WARNING: Scams & Frauds

[MarkShot 631]

Dear Friends,

I am taking a brief break from gaming, coding, and education to write this.

I want to make you aware of something.  Scams and frauds are wide spread, and this will get worse; not better.  Scam is a chance to steal based on creating some false perception (sometimes we say a "con" in English).  Fraud is a chance to steal where there is, in fact, a tangible asset that does exist.

All of us are heading forward into harder days.  We might hope for greater humanity and compassion.  This will happen, but scams and frauds are on the rise too.

You would think like the baby formula shortage ... who would starve a child or stress a mother for gain?  But there are many who will see this as an excellent opportunity as the extreme need makes it that much easier to pull off.  (CB recently reminded me that there is a distinction between doing ethical business and greed.)

This week I was just a victim of a fraud.  Ideally, I would like to share the details, but it is better not to:

* In the USA, you can bring a civil suit against practically anyone.  Even frivolous where it may be dismissed and the plaintiff fined, you can still make the filing and have it seen by a judge (and served).  Only civil servants (including politicians) have immunity from civil suits in discharging their duties.

* On the Internet, obscure comments may cease to be obscure and go viral.  Some politician reads my story/tweets and all of a sudden millions have seen a tweet.  NOW, I AM GOING TO BE SUED.

So, I will just outline the basics of the fraud.  Company X sells safety equipment.  The primary market is organizational and not consumer.  But any business is wise to diversify.  Also, as society becomes more precarious, the market for consumers to buy safety equipment is growing.  So, X's business is booming at the moment, but any line will have rejects.  A reputable business has a number choices:  dispose of line rejects, offer rejects at steep discounts, or fix rejects and offer them discounted as refurbished.  Now, X has very good reviews, since they send the quality stuff off the line to reviewers.

So, how does X handle rejects?  They sell them full price based on reviews into the consumer market (they would not risk this crap going to organizations).  Now, if you are a mother with a hungry child and the formula is week past expiration, realistically when that box of formula arrives, what are you going to do?  So, many of X's consumer sales end up being closed transactions.  Remember the defects have no market value if marketed "as is" precisely due to the fact that lives depend on it ... so who would cut corners to save a buck?  For those, who contact customer service without even a reply you are passed to an insurer (that you paid for) who sight unseen gives you 66 cents on the dollar without even requiring proof or return of merchandise.  This is predatory fraud.

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Now, some more interesting examples from where I live, Taiwan (the fraud capitol of the world).  Why is Taiwan such a home for scams and fraud?  The max penalties are small fines, and you can reincorporate the next day after being found guilty (even if you have cheated the elderly out of retirement savings or caused death).  In the last 10 years, I have seen poison in powdered milk.  I have seen motor oil in cooking oil.  They show you the fresh oil that was used doing a change on your car, but I would actually like to see the discarded oil and that it didn't go into someone's salad!

Which brings us to one of the best saddest scams of this year.  The CDC was going to change the quarantine policy here.  The public did not know this, but insurers seemingly did.  The public knew the incredibly infectious Omicron was inbound ... some BAx was coming for the island.  The insurers offered Quarantine Policies with a pay out of 1000:1 if you had to go to a quarantine facility due to COVID.  It was truly one of the best financial investments one could make here.  It was the proverbial "sure thing".

Of course, the CDC announced policy changes, but the public had their policies.  As Omicron began it's march from the North to the South of the island, the ERs became flooded.  Were they flooded with symptomatically critical people?  In some cases yes ...  But mainly they were flooded by asymptomatic and minor cases who wanted medical certification for their insurance claims submission (even though insurers were not going to pay, since quarantine facilities has been disbanded).  Imagine that ... ERs flooded due to a scam while other gasped their last breath or went into cardiac arrest while waiting for triage???

Beware ... life is not only going to get hard ... there will be many predators out there.

(back to my regular scheduled abnormal life)